Your website's role in the sales funnel: Insights for Sales Directors to capitalise on

Maximising growth by leveraging your website’s role in the sales funnel

In this post, we will explore your website’s role in the sales funnel, with key insights and strategies to empower Sales Directors in harnessing the full potential of their websites.

First, let’s delve into the concept of the sales funnel. It comprises stages that a potential customer goes through. Generally sales and marketers call these awareness, consideration, and decision. 

Aligning your website content with each stage helps you guide prospects seamlessly through their customer journey. And visual representations of the stages in the sales funnel help to illustrate a potential customer’s progress, which often supports team alignment and communication.

Now let’s look at website optimisation for each stage in the funnel:

1. Optimising website content for awareness
2. Nurturing leads in the consideration stage
3. Closing the deal with decision stage strategies

Optimising website content for awareness

Support the awareness phase of your sales funnel by combining engaging content strategies with user-friendly and intuitive web design, and by leveraging external channels that drive visitors to your site.

Engaging blog posts, infographics, and videos can be powerful tools to generate interest. And ensure your site is visually-appealing and functional, with easy navigation and a cohesive design that reflects your brand identity.

Naturally, social media plays a key role at this point too. It’s likely your goals will be to get your brand noticed with content that connects with your audience and encourages them participate in discussions. Plus, you can amplify reach with paid ads.

Nurturing leads in the consideration stage

Your website is one of the most important tools for capturing leads. You can nurture these leads through email marketing and personalisation, showing them the benefits of choosing your products or services.

Implement lead capture forms strategically across your website. You could offer valuable resources in exchange for contact information to build a robust lead database.

Segment your audience based on their personas, preferences and behaviour. Tailor content for them and deliver it through email marketing campaigns designed to nurture, while providing them with relevant information that moves them closer to a purchasing decision.

Clearly communicate the benefits of your products or services while addressing relevant pain points head on. This gives you the opportunity to position your offerings as solutions to the challenges your target audience faces.

Closing the deal with decision stage strategies 

When your prospects are in their decision-making phase, your website can provide transparency about pricing and key details, plus evidence that buying with you won’t be a choice they regret. 

Typically transparency builds trust and confidence for potential buyers, so make your pricing clear and be comprehensive with details about your products or services.

You can back this up with user reviews, testimonials and case studies. This gives a voice to existing, satisfied customers and shows their real experiences – which can significantly influence the decision-making process for potential customers.

And finally, once that decision tips in your favour, you’ll need your site to deliver a streamlined buying process. Whether that’s a checkout page that is simple with minimal friction, or a form to take advantage of an incentive like a free trial, this is your opportunity to motivate users to make their purchase via your site.

Leveraging analytics for continuous improvement

Nothing compares to the value that website analytics offers to the sales process. Regularly review website analytics to deepen your understanding of user behaviour: Identify pages that resonate, map out customer journeys, and uncover drop-off points.

Use data insights to reduce friction and remove bottlenecks in the sales funnel. We recommend implementing A/B testing and other optimisation techniques to enhance user experience and increase conversions.

For eCommerce, this has clear consequences: According to Baymard Institute, an estimated 70% of shoppers abandon their carts before completing checkout. But you can leverage analytics to tackle this.  We’ve written a GA4 guide to expose dark spots in your checkout flow and drill into your sales funnel to deepen your customer insights.

Extending reach with mobile responsiveness and accessibility

There’s a powerful correlation between UX and conversions. Plus mobile responsiveness and accessibility are crucial for UX. 

If you haven’t yet acknowledged the importance of having an intuitive, responsive and accessible site, it’s time to take notice – and making improvements in these areas will have a direct impact on sales conversion rates.

Accessibility ensures your website is usable by a diverse audience, including individuals with disabilities. It not only broadens your reach, but also there’s a legal and ethical obligation to make sure your site is accessible.

Case study: 2300+ ROI for SS Great Britain

Bristol’s top attraction, SS Great Britain, needed a website that was accessible, inclusive and engaging. This involved a completely new information architecture, user-centric design and better use of visual assets to reflect SS Great Britain’s vision and meet the diverse needs of its audience. What we delivered:

• User-centric UX design concepts planned with high fidelity wireframing and prototyping
• UI design integrating brand guidelines into digital style guides and referencing offline visual identity
• An accessible and mobile responsive site with intuitive, user-friendly navigation
• New functionality such as an interactive timeline experience to highlight storylines and historical periods
• Engaging user experience with media-rich storytelling using an immersive video background and narrative-building text effects

The results: 2,300+ ROI over 2 years

Watch our video case study: Our work with SS Great Britain

Providing evidence through case studies and success stories

Your website is a great space for sharing real-world examples, use cases and outcomes that will resonate with your target audience. 

Even better, you can use your site to share case studies and success stories that demonstrate social proof, connecting with the psychological concept that decision making is influenced by other people. 

Together, these parts of your website provide important context and valuable evidence to ease potential customers through the final stages in your sales funnel. 

Case study: ChannelPorts hitting KPI in a week

ChannelPorts is a multi-faceted company that delivers cross-border solutions for the freight industry. They wanted to evolve their website to reflect the new brand, but also to improve the customer education and the journey through the website to increase conversions.

We worked to improve conversions through a combination of digital strategy, web design and development, and web performance expertise. This included planning out where stronger and more relevant web content could be introduced across the site and increasing calls-to-action, feeding more leads into the sales pipeline.

As part of this strategy, we supported ChannelPorts to increase “trust” through improved visibility of testimonials and case studies.

This provided social proof to help future customers make their purchasing decisions. It also helped ChannelPorts reach more customers through SEO, because search engines like Google use trust scores as a central component for assessing content quality for search results.

The results: Hitting conversion KPI within one week

Read our case study: Our work with ChannelPorts

Cross-team collaboration is crucial, particularly aligning your marketing and sales teams.

Using a CRM system is an excellent way to track and manage leads. A centralised system enhances communication and streamlines the sales process. Meanwhile, it supports transparency and collaboration between sales and marketing. 

Consistent, well-targeted messaging that aligns with the various stages of the sales funnel, combined with a good choice of CRM, helps you smoothly transition leads captured through your website into well-nurtured sales.

Case study: Salesforce automation of global B2B eCommerce sales for Zuken

Zuken offers best-in-class software platforms for electrical and electronic engineering, and data management. We supported Zuken to gain visibility of sales data from their B2B eCommerce store within Salesforce. Processes were automated to send data to the right teams in a fast and efficient way.

This was the first ever automated process connecting with Salesforce for this client, and an example of the effective, streamlined business processes that can be achieved through clever website integrations.

Read our case study: Our work with Zuken

Sales Directors play a pivotal role in leveraging their websites for maximum sales impact. 

By understanding your website’s role in the sales funnel and embracing data-driven strategies, Sales Directors can navigate the digital landscape with confidence.

Continuous adaptation and optimisation is key, ensuring that your website remains a dynamic and effective tool in the modern sales funnel. Remember the role your website plays in shaping success.